Monday, August 27, 2018

"On Weight" YorkFest 2018

YorkFest 2018 Adult Literary Contest
Asahel Church
1st Place Non-Fiction


-->
On Weight

Perhaps we were all born to fly. But gravity and mass make for a formidable opponent. And the negative connotations of the word ‘weight’ surprise me. It conjures thoughts of excess and disability, Twinkies and electric scooters. There’s also the seriousness that the word weight conveys. It literally sits heavy on your tongue.

My relationship with weight has been mixed. I come from a family of small people. Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood I was too skinny. I used to sleep under a large heap of blankets, the steady pressure from above keeping me safe and warm in our drafty attic. Much later in college, sailing on blustery fall and spring afternoons through the daunting Lake Michigan chop, I was always twice as cold and twice as bundled up. But I was small for a reason. Small crew made for fast sailing and quick action in tight spaces. I bailed water from the bottom of the boat furiously, fighting weight.

Miracles have always surrounded the successful defiance of weight. The Egyptian pyramids, wonder bras, and airplanes. In the early 1700s, Connecticut colonists traveled for miles to observe a “floating rock” –a several ton boulder that inexplicably moved up the slope of an embankment. I used to dream, re-occurringly, that I could fly. Or float, to be more accurate. The dream seemed to be a combination of a childhood aspiration for piloting, and the deep impression that a particular “Diving Tony” left on me. He was a 2 inch plastic replica of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger mascot that due to some unknown physical (or metaphysical?) property would dive to the bottom of a recycled two liter coke bottle when it was squeezed. That squeezing action, combined with my desire to fly morphed into a vivid dream that by squeezing the right muscles in my body, my rear end as I remember, I could float up above the houses much the same way that Tony dove to the bottom of the coke bottle. Weightlessness- that was what I dreamed about. And it became so real that I more than once found myself testing out my new found ability after waking.

Excess weight. Underweight. Dead weight. Large boxes that tempt you to over pack. Large suitcases frantically re-configured at airports.

My friend Bryan bought a wood laminate boat last year. We joke that the work involved in keeping up with it is worth it in exchange for the misty looks and nostalgic complements of observers. We’re not likely to win a lot of regattas with the old lady, but she is beautiful. It sits heavy on its trailer and in a light breeze displaces the water sluggishly, the boom and slack lines tangling and bumping into our heads as we crouch inboard trying to keep the boat flat. But in a breeze, on the edge of a summer Chesapeake storm or in a blow after, when the sky clears and the clouds are puffy, the dinghy lifts up out of the water and fairly skims. Bryan clips in to the harness and we hike out hard, abs and hamstrings screaming and souls thrumming. Then we fly.



No comments:

Post a Comment